First Dozen Years 2004-2016 Table of Contents
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THE CENTER FOR URBAN HISTORY OF EAST CENTRAL EUROPE THE FIRST DOZEN YEARS 2004-2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS 4 FOREWORD 7 INTRODUCTION 9 THE BEGINNINGS The Founding The Place The Team 17 GOING DIGITAL Digital Archival Collections Interconnecting the Collections Mapping the City Navigating Streets and Their Pasts 33 ACADEMIC ACTIVITIES Formats and Cooperation Summer Schools Teaching Conferences and Workshops Seminars Lectures and Presentations 45 RESEARCH Initiating Research Projects and Cooperation Developing Research Areas 53 PUBLIC HISTORY Bridging Public and Academic Spheres Round Tables and Discussions Public Memorial Projects Exhibitions Educational Programs 67 RESOURCES Grants, Fellowships & Internships Library Website Funding 75 PEOPLE 81 INDICES 99 IMPRINT FOREWORD One day not long ago, I attended a meeting with the Center’s current director. We sat to- gether in the library with a lawyer we intended to employ for some legal services. Apart from discussing business, we also spoke about our institution, its activities and its staff. Suddenly, one of our young researchers entered the room. The lawyer’s face changed to an expression of surprise, which was followed by an overt confession: “I always thought histo- rians were old.“ Understandably, this sentence has become a bon mot in our community ever since. Another incident: a colleague loosely connected to our institution complained about the awkward verbosity of our name: How can one choose a designation which is so hard for people to remember and such a headache for any layout specialist to fit into his ever-lim- ited, costly space? The message was: you historians have no idea about the rules of our money-driven, fast-paced world. Conciseness, not preciseness, paves the way to market success. Conclusion: Historians are deeply impractical, hopelessly complicated and obsessed with verbose self-indulgence. This brochure tells the story of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe from its beginnings in 2004 to the present day (2016). It will hopefully unravel all myths and ste- reotypes, and explain the whys and hows. The aforementioned question of our name offers an illuminating starting point, as the three semantic components of our official designation remain essential for our identity. “Center,” unlike the more official term “Institute,” stands for an independent academic entity. Independence remains our reality, our credo and our chief asset. “Urban History” stands for our area of proficiency. Our primary focus is the city. Our inspiration: the multitude of unexplored research questions embedded in the complexity of urban societies throughout history. “East Central Europe” stands for our physical location and the geographical scope we cover. Today, just as back in 2004, we remain the only institution with this specialization in all the countries covered by our name. 4 In a wider context, both our academic focus and our geographical scope also imply po- litical commitments: to urbanity as a culturally liberal project, and to Ukraine as part of the European project. In this sense, our full name refers to a value-based foundation that informs our work and defines us in a permanently unstable political and cultural environment. The heavy load of our full name is, however, only one matter. Everyday language is another. In Lviv where we are located, we have come to be labeled as concisely as my colleague from the advertisement sector would have wished. We are just “The Center.” Hence, nowadays in Lviv meeting in the “Center” can mean two things: either around the tourist hub on Market Square, or on No. 6 Bohomoltsia Street, with a colleague in the library or for a cup of coffee in our café. What a pleasant confusion and everyday reminder of what has been achieved in the past years! Leaving the name question aside, it remains a challenge for any research center in the humanities to explain its raison d’être to the wider public. This is especially true in post- socialist Ukraine where non-profit private investment in the educational sphere is tru- ly exotic. Academia in general and history departments in particular are dominated by state-run institutions and their bureaucracies. As a rule, their authority is accompanied with ideologically driven precepts regarding the content of research and teaching. Here is where the asset of independence comes in, but also the importance of persistence: there are plenty of short-lived initiatives in the cultural sphere, many of them funded externally, but very few institutions which can look back on the history of a dozen years. Indeed, in an institutional environment formed by rapid change and high fluctuation, the Center can already be counted as part of the Establishment. Nevertheless, referring to the first anecdote above, we are a young institution. As of December 2016, the average age of the 24 people working on a regular contractual basis was 29. They come from different parts of Ukraine, and their academic backgrounds vary from history and cultural studies to architecture and sociology. History at the Center is interdisciplinary, crosses borders and explores new themes and approaches in research, teaching and discourse. What makes us young is therefore less a matter of age, and more a result of what we do. Take digital history. Our institution benefits from an intense collaboration between technical practitioners from the world of programming on the one hand, and historians as content managers on the other. This combination helps us keep up with worldwide develop- ment in a field where both methodological reflection and project-based implementation are crucially important. Our publicly accessible products range from an interactive historical map 5 of the city of Lviv to a vast digital archive comprised of maps, images, videos and interviews from all over Ukraine (and beyond). Not surprisingly, as visitors’ statistics on our website show, it is these projects which attract the highest numbers of users. Or let us take public history, another one of our domains. The main objective here is to bridge the gap between academic research and the urban audience. In our exhibitions we historicize major areas in the crossroads of politics, culture and everyday life. “Eros and Sexuality,” “Home,” “Sport,” and the 90s (“Tomorrow will be Better”) have been some of our exhibition themes in the past twelve years. In our educational program we reach out to universities and schools, thereby suggesting new ways of experiencing and interpreting history. Finally, we have been acting as content and logistics advisors to the public sector in public space projects. All in all – again with reference to the anecdote above – these are examples of quite a “practical” approach. Our biggest endeavor over the past twelve years has been widening and deepening our research profile. Through many of our focuses, such as the “Socialist City,” Jewish history, and the extensive field of Heritage and Memory, the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe has gained major recognition as a distinguished player in innovative research and international exchange. The growing number of staff contributions to foreign-language pub- lications has enhanced this picture. It is largely thanks to the creative effort of the Center’s three consecutive directors, Andryi Zayarnyuk (2004-2007), Tarik Cyril Amar (2007-2010) and Sofia Dyak (2010-present) that this has been achieved. It is the latter to whom I am indebted for compiling the review, which constitutes the content of the following pages. Dr. Harald Binder Founder and President of Foundation Board INTRODUCTION I joined the Center for Urban History in 2008, and have served as Director since 2010. It has been my privilege to develop this institution, which is now both relevant locally in the city of Lviv, and increasingly present on the international academic stage. Currently, the Center is one of the most significant research institutions in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, recognized for its activities in scholarly research on urban history, digital archiving, and public history. By bridging academic and public formats, we not only create a space for new encounters and discussions, but also contribute to the circulation of ideas, themes, and questions that are largely unaddressed in Ukraine. Our hybrid institutional design, blending the scholarly and the public, now reflects the aspirations, work, and commitment of the team of people who work at the Center, and those who visit and take part in the Center’s activities. The Center's rich roster of academic activities includes regular seminars attended by local university students, lectures by visiting fellows and scholars, international conferences and scholarly workshops, and summer schools training the next generation of urban historians, scholars of Jewish culture, and museum practitioners. Conference topics have synergized with our research focuses and informed our public history projects. For example, the Center's first major international conference was conceived by Dr. Tarik Cyril Amar (Academic Director from 2008-2010). It brought together 24 speakers to discuss contemporary Jewish heritage in the cities of Eastern and Central Europe. Since that conference, the topic of urban herit- age(s) has become one of the research focuses at the Center, and our public history projects directly tackle the challenge of reconceptualizing heritage ideas and practices, as the new “Space of Synagogues” memorial shows. For our most recent conference (August 2017) on the roles of cities during the transition periods "in or out of socialism," we received more than 83 proposals from 31 countries. The idea for this conference developed from another research focus of the Center – planned urbanity – and our educational and digital projects on the 20th century modernist urban vision. We aim for such connections between the latest scholarly THE BEGINNINGS 7 research, projects oriented towards the general public, and ways to share our knowledge through digital technologies. Finally, the Center’s success raises the question of what non-state research institutions in humanities can accomplish in Ukraine, where the state-centered academic infrastructure has a strong legacy.